Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures.
The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
OWC ThunderBlades exist, but 32TB will set you back 9 grand.
You should be able to assemble something with USB-C for under 5k. That's not a mass consumer market thing, but perfectly doable, if your use case warrants it. We are stuck with 2021 pricing, but now with options of 8TB per NVMe drive at way higher speed.
36TB+ HHD external WD drive combos were always around EUR 1000 over last 5 years. With a short low end around EUR 600 in 2023
https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderblade?sku=OWCTB3TBL8X32
>Nobody is stopping anyone from buying a USB-C powered and connected very portable 2 or 4 slot external NVMe enclosures.
That's more expensive than buying a single large capacity drive. It's also a terrible idea. I would never trust a low cost chinese controller with terabytes of my data.
>The old SATA SSD form factor is dead and wont come back.
That's true and very unfortunate.